Banning Unregistered Users

Question

Recently I've noticed quite a few low quality posts made by "unregistered" users whose user name is of the form "user3####". For example, this and this. I'm sure there are a couple others but I can't find them right now (maybe because their posts have been deleted). In my experience at Econ.SE, such unregistered users almost never made positive contributions, in the form of good quality questions and answers (with perhaps only a handful of exceptions). I wonder if we could/should require registration to post questions/answers on Econ.SE. Of course this is not going to completely weed out trolls or low quality Q&As, but at least it raises the cost of trolling/low quality posts by a little.

I am aware that there are legitimate reasons not to implement such a requirement network-wide. But I think the case for implementing it at Econ.SE is strong.

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Edit (2020/10/23): Latest instances here and here.

Answer 1

Originally I was quite warm to this idea, as expressed in my comments, but after doing research on this issue I am not sure if it will help.

1. According to the discussion on this software engineering meta post, their experiment with banning unregistered users was not successful.

2. As already discussed in comments on this and on other meta discussions regarding this problem, based on the writing patterns and topics raised by the unregistered users (e.g. EROI/depletion Q - even if the users ask different Q or make different A they will usually have one post on this topic) they in fact seem to be all one user (Of course, we never can be sure of that but what is the likelihood that there are multiple people in the world having such specific EROI/Depletion questions and answers?).

   Furthermore, as brought to my attention by user GGMG-he-him in comments on this deleted post (you should have high enough rep to see it) this is also known troll at other sites (see this meta post). You might also notice that recently some of those accounts were merged into DJ Sims and you can see the user being active and causing problems at almost every SE site.

   Consequently, this would be a policy that would be made mostly for a single user. Of course, there might be more such users (I will try to deal with your data request in your other meta Q as soon as I will manage to figure out where to get the stats and if it's okay to share them - since the posts on other sites are old and rules on sharing/accessible data might have changed), but because this seems to be one user persistently creating sock puppet accounts with VPN even such statistics might not tell us much (given this troll persistence I would not be surprised if they created number of accounts counting in double digits). Although, eventually many of the sock puppets accounts are merged with main account of the troll user, some of them might have been just outright deleted/separately suspended which will bias the statistics.

3. Even though it is likely just one (or at best few) user(s) I would not mind implementing any automated policy, but from my understanding from reading the meta posts linked in this answer this is not really making it much harder for the troll to be active. As pointed by @BrianRomanchuk in comments under your other question the user now registers the accounts and it does not seem that this creates much obstacles for the troll.

   Furthermore, from seeing discussions around this issues on other metas (see examples here or here or here) and discussing this in the past with other mods my understanding is that this kind of persistent troll requires manual handling. This is why it is very important to not just close/downvote such posts but also flag them so they can be promptly closed/deleted (when you flag a post moderators get notification about that - I am just mentioning that since some users might not realize that this is helpful).